Observing Log for Mike Durkin6/8/2004 about 5:00 AM to 7:30 AM RMSP, about 60-70 degrees Transparency: 6/10, Seeing: 5/10 127mm Mak Big day of the year, today is the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. Got to Robert Moses around 5AM and there was already a fairly large crowd there, mostly AOSers. Sunrise was at about 5:20 AM, adn unfortunately there was a large cloud bank blocking that part of the sky. Since I wasn't sure if I would get to see anything of the transit, I took a couple of photos of the moon, which was near the quarter phase. After about 30-60 minutes, the sun started poking through some holes in the clouds. I was using my 127mm Mak with a Solar filter and a 30mm eyepiece (51x) and with the clouds also acting as a filter, I had a very hard time seeing the disk of the sun at first in the telescope. Eventually though I could see the Sun through a large enough hole, and there was Venus!! It appeared as a fairly large black disk, I'd estimate about the 2-3x the size of a typical sunspot. A few more holes through the clouds opened up, so I was playing hide and seek a bit with the sun through the clouds. I tried to take a couple of pictures, but the sun never seemed bright enough through the filter to make out clearly in my camera finder. As Venus approached third contact, I was not able to make out the black drop effect, althuogh I only had about 10-20 seconds of time to see Venus before clouds covered it up again on me. I did get to see Venus quite a bit more between third and fourth contact. I tried to see if I could make out any refraction effects of the sun going through the atmosphere of Venus, however I didn't see any. And wouldn't you know it, not even 5 minutes after the transit ended, the sun just cleared the clouds that were blocking us for most of the morning and gave us a clear view of the disk of the sun. Althuogh not quite the idea transit experience, I would have like to have taken some good pictures and been able to look at the transit for more than 60 seconds at a time, this was still pretty good. After all, it could have been completely overcast and raining.
The resulting pictures are here.
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